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Peter Hitchens: I have got 'a lot of pleasure' out of Corbyn's success

LONDON - "The
country is finished. It can't be rescued and nobody wants to
rescue it," Peter Hitchens, renowned journalist, author and
broadcaster, tells me.

"The country is dead. All attempts to rescue it are like doctors
gathering around a corpse and injecting it with vitamins and
antibiotics. It won't make a difference. It's still a corpse -
just a corpse with vitamins in it."

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Last week I sat down with Hitchens, to hear his reflections on
what most people agree has been one of the most turbulent years
of British political history.

Hitchens, now 65, has for decades been the standard-bearer for
social conservatism in this country. The Mail on Sunday columnist
and brother of the late Christopher Hitchens, holds passionate
disdain for the Conservative Party, which he believes abandoned
true social conservatism long ago, and holds both the Tory and
Labour establishment in contempt.

He, in the aftermath of last year's EU referendum, said the two
parties "ought to collapse" and make way for replacements that
better reflected what he regarded as the true dividing lines in
British politics: Remainers vs Leavers, and social liberals vs
social conservatives. Since then, a general election has taken
place, in which the difference between what the Tories and Labour
offered to the public was arguably the starkest it had been since
the early eighties.

Does Hitchens still believe the two beasts of British party
politics ought to die?

"I no longer care. I have given up. I strove to the utter most
limit of whatever influence a national newspaper columnist
possesses to urge my readers in 2010 to help me destroy the
Conservative Party - and nobody paid any attention or a blind bit
of notice to my advice," Hitchens tells me.

"I have realised I have no influence over events, so I may as
well look on and laugh.

"So that's what I do: I look on and laugh," Peter Hitchens says,
sipping his tea.

I can understand Corbyn's appeal

Despite Hitchens' right-wing views, he says he can understand the
appeal of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

"He [Corbyn] recognises something in a way that neither the Tory
party nor its twin in New Labour do not. For millions of people
living in Britain, life isn't much fun. By simply observing that
people were working on zero-hour contracts; couldn't afford their
rents; were making ends meet by loans; that a university degree
doesn't get you a job; Corbyn observed that life for large
numbers of people is pretty thin. By noticing that the economic
recovery just hadn't happened outside London and the southeast,
he got the sympathy of an awful lot of people and that's how he
did so well [in the election].

"He didn't do what he should have done - and what the radical
party of the left in this country used to do - and that was to
identify clearly and openly with the cultural, moral and social
revolution which is taking place.

"The Conservative Party doesn't want anything to do with the
large numbers of people who are hurt by this revolution and would
like to reverse it. The interesting thing was at the referendum -
which I didn't support, take part in and generally deplored - was
that the division which ought to be reflected by political
parties emerged briefly and then vanished again. We went back to
party politics with two parties that don't represent the
divisions in this country."

'I never thought May was any good'

Hitchens admits that he didn't foresee a Brexit vote until the
final weeks of the referendum campaign but says he knew the snap
general election "would go wrong" for the Tories the minute
Theresa May announced it on the steps of 10 Downing Street on
April 18. He was so confident that he bet on May to lose her
majority.

"I never thought she [May] was any good," Hitchens explains,
taking a bite from a slice of lemon drizzle cake.

"I thought from the first time I encountered her that she was a
dull and uninteresting politician who moves with the times. I
remember looking into her the week where she suddenly moved from
being an opponent of all women shortlists to a supporter of them.
This is a huge revolution of the mind. Yet she offered no
explanation on it.

"She isn't a good public speaker. I thought her performances
versus Jeremy Corbyn in Prime Minister's Questions were woeful. I
could not understand why people were seriously touting her as a
prime minister."

The Conservative Party's attacks on Corbyn were so relentless,
Hitchens tells me, that he "got quite a lot of pleasure" out of
witnessing the Labour leader outperform the forecasts, despite
the many differences in opinion between himself and the MP for
Islington North.

A lot of the things which you can level against Corbyn could
equally be levelled against the Tories and often in a worse way.

"One of the reasons from the beginning I've said stop this
nonsense of attacking Corbyn over and over again is because it's
neither civilised nor sensible. I did get quite a lot of pleasure
out of his pretty successful election campaign and his far better
performance than that of May.

"I've been saying for so long 'stop this!' He represents a
current in British politics and he is entitled to be heard. A lot
of the things which you can level against Corbyn could equally be
levelled against the Tories and often in a worse way."

What does he mean by this?

"Well, Corbyn - disgracefully in my view - has been a sympathiser
of Sinn Fein and that isn't very nice. But who put Irish
republicanism into government? The Tories and New Labour. It was
Blair who surrendered a large NATO power and one of the world's
greatest military forces to a bunch of criminal gangsters in the
IRA. It wasn't Jeremy Corbyn. So how can they lecture Corbyn
about the IRA? The reason the streets are swamped with released
IRA prisoners is not that Corbyn wanted them released but Labour
and the Tories wanted them released."

He adds: "Most of the glee I get is laughing at the discomfort of
my opponents."

"So, obviously, a Corbyn premiership would be a discomfort for
the Labour Blairites who I despise and the Tory Blairites who I
despise, so I would probably find it quite funny. I've found the
Corbyn thing quite funny from the start."

A serious Christian cannot lead the Liberal Democrats

caption

Peter Hitchens appearing on Question Time.

source

BBC

Hitchens, a former
atheist who is now a practising Christian, tells me he wasn't at
all surprised by what Tim Farron endured during the general
election campaign, claiming "all parties have relegated
Christianity to a marginalised and to some extent despised
position." Farron faced questions throughout the campaign about
his views on homosexuality after he refused to say whether he
believed that gay sex was a sin. He resigned as leader of the
Liberal Democrats a week after the election, citing his personal
struggle to both hold Christian views and be the leader of the
party.

"To be a political leader - especially of a progressive, liberal
party in 2017 - and to live as a committed Christian, to hold
faithfully to the Bible's teaching, has felt impossible for me,"
Farron said upon announcing his resignation.

I don't really understand how anybody who has any serious
Christian moral views can become an activist, let alone the
leader of the Liberal Democrats.

"He got into a predictable mess," Hitchens tells me.

"I don't really understand how anybody who has any serious
Christian moral views can become an activist, let alone the
leader of the Liberal Democrats, which is a secular party. But
there it is."

Do you think Christianity is being driven out of British
political life?

"Christianity in this country has been removed from the public
square some time ago. It no longer guides the law. The Equality
Act specifically made Christianity equal to all other religions
in a country where it was once formally the established church.
That was a pretty considerable blow.

"It now has no claim of superiority to any other religion.
In some cases, Islam isn't quite as equal as the others because
it stands up for itself rather more fiercely and the government
and the establishment are afraid of it. Ultimately, Christianity
in law and practice has been dethroned. If you want to be a
Christian well that's fine, but don't expect in any sphere at all
that people will respect you the more for it."

"The EU is like Hotel California"

One of the general election's biggest casualties was UKIP, a
party which Hitchens once said Brits ought to vote for if the
option of not voting at all wasn't palatable. The party under
Paul Nuttall's leadership won just 1.8% of the national vote.
This was 10.8% down on what it won in 2015. The battered and
bruised party will attempt to pick itself back up again when it
elects its third leader within the space of 12 months in
September, but Hitchens believes the political force that was
once dubbed a dangerous threat to the Conservative Party has no
future left.

caption

Former UKIP leaders Paul Nuttall (left) and Nigel Farage.

source

Toby Melville/Reuters

"I've for a long time advocated abstention from voting as the
best way of undermining the fraudulent nature of our government,"
he says. "I find that people have this ridiculous idea that
voting is some sort of sacrament. That is was allegedly won for
people who died for it on occasions which they can't name. Nobody
died for the right to vote.

"But I've said if you absolutely have to vote for someone then
vote for UKIP. It has always been to me a Dads' Army party. A
party of exiled Thatcherites and cravat-wearing retired colonels
with absolutely no hope at all. I never liked Farage for his
attitude towards drugs. He's never been a moral or social
conservative. He's just an exiled Thatcherite."

I never liked Farage for his attitude towards drugs. He's never
been a moral or social conservative. He's just an exiled
Thatcherite.

What might come as a surprise to Hitchens' more casual observers
is that he neither supported the in-out referendum taking place
nor believes in what has been dubbed as by commentators as a
"hard" Brexit. He first became an advocate for leaving the
European Union 14 years ago after a visit to Norway and tells me
replicating the "sensible" Norwegian model - widely regarded as a
possible version of "soft" Brexit - is the best way for Britain
to leave without "needlessly punishing itself" in the process.
Norway is not an EU member state but enjoys full access to the
European single market as a member of the European Economic Area
(EEA). May has in the past ruled
out copying existing models, saying the UK's will be "unique"
in design."

"It seemed to me that the Norway option was a very sensible one
to aim for. I still do," he says.

"The EEA would strike me as the best way to do it without
needlessly punishing ourselves. In the EEA you actually have a
surprising amount of control over your borders if you wish to
exercise it. You might get your fishing grounds and control over
a lot of other things. I just hope that the people involved in
negotiations have the sense to go for it."

Do you think they will?

"Who knows? David Davis is an intelligent man. He's an ambitious
man and he doesn't want to fail.

"The EU is like Hotel California: you can check out but you can
never leave.

"It seems to me that when you have a country where the
political establishment, the legal profession and most of the
media, particularly the BBC, is in favour of staying, it'd be
very difficult to actually leave. That's what's now happening.
The Leave vote is being frustrated. We will formally leave the EU
but we go from being half-in the EU, which we are now, to
half-out the EU."

The coming economic crisis

Hitchens throughout our interview insists that he is "done" with
politics. In decades gone by he has tried to bring about
wholesale alterations to the British political system - not least
the destruction of the Conservative Party.

He has now retired from activism, he tells me, and finds life
much more "cheerful" observing from the sidelines rather than
getting involved in the scrum. "I'm not vain enough anymore to
believe that I can change anything," he says.

"That was what 2010 cured me of. I'm much more cheerful now
because I don't get in states of total rage with people failing
to see their own interests. Okay, if that's what you want, then
that's what you want. I spent sometimes weeks in email exchanges
with readers in extreme detail why the Conservative Party would,
if it came back to power, kick them in the teeth and all the ways
in which it has. They'd say 'yes yes Mr Hitchens but we've got to
get Gordon Brown out.' I would just have to go across the room
and softly bang my head against the wall. Everything was reduced
to tribalism."

Are you not alarmed by the turbulence this country has found
itself in?

"Well, I hope so. The problem is with national decline it can
produce turbulence. The underlying problem in this country is
that its economy doesn't work anymore. People say 'oh it's
alright we are sovereign we can have a huge national debt.' Well,
you can if you have a good, strong economy, but if you don't and
your current account deficit gets big and you combine that with
the gigantic private debt, then it seems to me you're asking for
serious inflation.

"I don't know quite how the next crisis is going to manifest
itself. Will we wake up one morning to find the cash machines
aren't working? I don't know.

Will we wake up one morning to find the cash machines aren't
working? I don't know.

"I just can't see how we can avoid a major economic crisis pretty
soon."

So how will this crisis be averted? Is there not a single MP who
impresses him? Does he not see even a sole glimmer of hope?

"No. Being an MP is not an activity as I'd class as being
particularly important. It doesn't matter. There are few more
insignificant creatures than backbench MPs. The front bench is a
desert.

"A range of extinct volcanoes would be a compliment because to be
extinct they would once have to be active."